Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  I had taken care that the duplicate keys manufactured for me by M. Necker had also been coated with silver, were in every way exact replicas of the original, and could with confidence present one on demand if my husband required it. But if he had been successful in finding the one I had lost but concealed that fact (and concealment was the very essence of his nature), and I presented one of the duplicates as the original when the original lay in his pocket, this would constitute proof that I had reproduced the key, a clear breach of trust. I could, of course, simply maintain that I had in fact lost it—this had the virtue of being true—meanwhile concealing from him the existence of the counterfeits. This seemed the better course.

  He sat that night at the dining table slicing a goose with a prune-and-foie-gras stuffing (taking the best parts for himself, I observed) and said without preamble, “Where do you meet your lover, Doroteo Arango?”

  Doroteo Arango, the Mexican revolutionary leader known to the world as Pancho Villa, was indeed in Paris at that moment, raising funds for his sacred and just cause, but I had had little contact with him and was certainly not yet his lover although he had pressed my breasts and tried to insinuate his hand underneath my skirt at the meeting of 23 July at my aunt Thérèse Perrault’s house in the Sixteenth at which he had spoken so eloquently. The strange Mexican spirit tequila had been served, golden in brandy snifters. I had not taken exception to his behavior, assuming that all Mexican revolutionary leaders behaved in this way, but he had persisted in sending me, hand-delivered by hard-riding vaqueros in Panhards, bottles of the pernicious liquor, one of which my husband was now waving in my face.

  I told him I had purchased a few bottles to assist the cause, much as one might buy paper flowers from schoolchildren, and that Arango was a well-known celibate with a special devotion to St. Erasmus of Delft, the castrate. “You gave him my machine gun,” Bluebeard said. This was true; the Maxim gun that usually rested in a dusty corner of the castle’s vast attic had been transferred, under cover of night, to one of the Panhards not long before. I had a truly frightful time wrestling the thing down the winding stairs. “A loan only,” I said. “You weren’t using it and he is pledged to rid Mexico of Díaz’s vile and corrupt administration by spring at the latest.”

  My husband had no love for the Díaz regime—held, in fact, a portfolio of Mexican railroad bonds of the utmost worthlessness. “Well,” he growled, “next time, ask me first.” This was the end of the matter, but I could see that his trust in me, not absolute in the best of seasons, was fraying.

  My involvement with Père Redon, the castle’s chaplain, was then, I blush to confess, at its fiery height. The handsome young priest, with his auburn locks and long, straight, white nose . . . It was to him that I had entrusted the three duplicate keys to the locked door and the eleven additional duplicate keys that I had caused to be made by the village’s second locksmith, a M. Becque. Redon had hidden one key behind each of the Bronzino plaques marking the chapel’s fourteen Stations of the Cross, and since the chapel was visited by my husband only at Christmas and Easter and on his own name day, I felt them safe there. Still, the cache of my letters that Redon kept in a small crypt carved out of the reverse side of the altar table worried me, even though he replastered the opening most skillfully each time he added a letter. The nun’s habit that I wore during the midnight Sabbats organized by the notorious Bishop of Troyes, in which we, Redon and I, participated (my shame and my delight, my husband drunk and dreaming all the while), hung chastely in the same closet that held Constantin’s Mass vestments—cassock and chasuble, alb and stole. The ring Constantin had given me, unholy yet cherished symbol of our love, remained in its tiny velvet casket on the altar itself, within the tabernacle, stuffed behind pyx, chalice, and ciborium. The chapel was in the truest sense a sanctuary, all thanks to a living and merciful God.

  “You must open the door,” Bluebeard said to me one afternoon at croquet—I had just hit his ball off into the shrubbery—“even though I forbid it.” What was I to make of this conundrum?

  “Dear husband,” I said, “I cannot imagine opening the door against your wishes. Why then do you say I must open it?”

  “I change the exhibit from time to time,” he said, grimacing. “You may not find, behind the door, what you expect. Furthermore, if you are to continue as my wife, you must occasionally be strong enough to go against my wishes, for my own good. Even the bluest beard amongst us, even the blackest nose, needs on occasion the correction of connubial give-and-take.” And he hung his head like a lycée boy.

  “Very well then,” I said. “Give me the key, for as you know I have lost mine.”

  He withdrew from his waistcoat pocket a silver key, and, leaving the game, I entered the castle and walked up the grand staircase to the third étage. Before I could reach the cursed portal, a house servant flourishing a telegram intercepted me. “For you, Madame,” she said, all rosy and out of breath from running. The message read “930177 1886445 88156031 04344979” and was signed “EVERLAST.” Coded of course, and the codebook far from me at this moment, recorded on fragile cigarette papers tightly rolled and concealed within the handlebars of my favorite yellow bicycle, “A” to “M” in the left handlebar, “N” to “Z” in the right handlebar, in the bicycle shed. “Everlast” was M. Grévy, the Finance Minister. What calamity was he announcing, and was he telling me to buy or sell? My entire fortune, as distinct from my husband’s, rested upon the Bourse; Everlast’s timely information, which had increased the value of my holdings in most satisfactory fashion, was vital to its continued existence. I’m finished, I thought; I’ll wear rags and become secretary to a cat-seller. I longed to rush to the bicycle shed, yet my intense curiosity about the contents of the prohibited chamber exerted the stronger sway. I turned the key in the lock and plunged through the door.

  In the room, hanging on hooks, gleaming in decay and wearing Coco Chanel gowns, seven zebras. My husband appeared at my side. “Jolly, don’t you think?” he said, and I said, “Yes, jolly,” fainting with rage and disappointment. . . .

  Construction

  I WENT to Los Angeles and, in due course, returned, having finished the relatively important matter of business which had taken me to Los Angeles, something to do with a contract, a noxious contract, which I signed, after the new paragraphs were inserted and initialed by all parties, tiresome business of initialing numberless copies of documents reproduced on onionskin, which does not feel happy in the hand. One of the lawyers wore a woven straw Western hat with a snake hatband. He had an excessive suntan. The hatband displayed as its centerpiece the head of a rattlesnake with its mouth stretched and the fangs touchable. Helen made a joke about it, she does something in the West Coast office, I’m not sure what it is but she is treated with considerable deference, they all seem to defer to her, an attractive woman, of course, but also one who manifests a certain authority, a quiet authority, had I had the time I would have asked someone what she was “all about,” as we say, but I had to get back, one cannot spend all one’s time in lawyers’ offices in Los Angeles. Although it was January and there was snow, blizzarding even, elsewhere, the temperature was in the fifties and the foliage, the collection of strange-looking trees, not trees but something between a tree and a giant shrub, that distinguishes the city, that hides what is less prepossessing than the trees—I refer to the local construction—which serves as a screen or scrim between the eye and the local construction, much of it admirable no doubt, the foliage was successfully carrying out its function, making Los Angeles a pleasant, reticent, green place, which fact I noticed before my return from Los Angeles.

  The flight back from Los Angeles was without event, very calm and smooth in the night. I had a cup of hot chicken noodle soup which the flight attendant was kind enough to prepare for me; I handed her the can of chicken noodle soup and she (I suppose, I don’t know the details) heated it in her microwave oven and then brought me the cup of hot chicken n
oodle soup which I had handed her in canned form, also a number of drinks which helped make the calm, smooth flight more so. The plane was half empty, there had been a half-hour delay in getting off the ground which I spent marveling at a sentence in a magazine, the sentence reading as follows: “[Name of film] explores the issues of love and sex without ever being chaste.” I marveled over this for the full half-hour we sat on the ground waiting for clearance on my return from Los Angeles, thinking of adequate responses, such as “Well we avoided that at least,” but no response I could conjure up was equal to or could be equal to the original text which I tore out of the magazine and folded and placed, folded, in my jacket pocket for further consideration at some time in the future when I might need a giggle. Then deplaning and carrying my bag through the mostly deserted tunnels of the airport to the cab rank, I obtained a cab driven by a black man who was, he said, leaving the cab business to begin a messenger service and had that very morning taken delivery on a truck, a 1987 Toyota, for the purpose and was, as soon as his shift ended, going to not only show the 1987 Toyota to his mother but also pick up his car insurance. He asked me what I thought about the economy and I said that I thought it would continue to do well, nationally, for a time but that the local economy, by which I meant that of the whole region, would I thought not do as well, because of structural problems. He then told me a story about being in the jungle in Vietnam with a fellow who had been there for seventeen months and got a letter from his wife in which she announced that she was pregnant but (and I quote) “hadn’t been doing anything,” and that his colleague, in the jungle, had then gone crazy, and I said, “Seventeen months, what was he doing there for seventeen months?” the normal tour being one year, and he said, “He extended,” and I said, “He extended?” and he said, “Yeah, extended,” and I said, “Then he was crazy before he got the letter,” and he said, “Bingo!” and we both said, “Hoo hoo,” in healthy fashion. He dropped me off in front of my building and I went upstairs and made a thickish cup of Hot Spiced Cider from an envelope of Hot Spiced Cider Mix that I had acquired free when I bought the bottle of Tree Top Apple Cider that was in my refrigerator, and took off my tie, and sat there, in my house, on my return from Los Angeles.

  I thought about the food that I had had in Los Angeles and about what I had to do next, the next day, the next several days, and of course about the long-range plan. I sat there in the darkened room without a shirt (I had taken off my shirt) thinking about the food I had had in Los Angeles, the rather ordinary Tournedos Rossini, the rather too down-to-earth Huevos Rancheros in a very expensive place that nevertheless presented its Huevos Rancheros on a tin plate, and its coffee in cracked blue enamel mugs, the Chuck Wagon was its name. Breakfast there with Helen, who had an air of authority, one could not immediately fathom its source and I was too tired, after a long night in Los Angeles, too tired or insufficiently interested, to ask the questions, either of her associates or my associates or of Helen directly, that would have allowed me to fathom the sources of her authority in Los Angeles, Los Angeles being to me a place where one went, of necessity, at rare intervals, to sign and/or initial or renegotiate whatever needed such attention. I noticed very little about the place, the shrubs or trees, saw a bit of the ocean from my hotel-room window, saw an old woman in a green bathrobe on the balcony of the building opposite, at the same level, the eleventh floor, and wondered if she was a guest or if she was one of those persons who clean the place; if she was one of those persons who clean the place it seemed unlikely that she would come to work in a green bathrobe and I am sure that she wore a green bathrobe, but she did not resemble a guest or tenant, she had a bent broken stooped losing-the-game look of the kind that defines the person who is not winning the game. Seldom am I in error about such things, the eidetic memory as we say, saw a figure of some kind possibly female atop the Mormon temple, the figure seemed to be leading the people somewhere, onward, presumably, saw several unpainted pictures on the street, from the windows of the limousine in which I was moved from place to place, Pietàs mostly, one creature holding another creature in its arms, at bus stops, mostly. Los Angeles.

  I thought about sand although I saw no sand in Los Angeles, they told me that there were beaches in the vicinity; the bit of ocean I had seen from the window of my hotel room on Wilshire implied sand but I saw no sand during my not extensive stay in Los Angeles, where I signed various documents having to do with the long-range plan, which I sat thinking about in the dank without my shirt upon my return from Los Angeles. I mentally compared our city to Los Angeles, a competition in which our city was not found inferior, you may be sure, a weighing of values in which our city was not given short weight, you may be sure. In the matter of madhouses alone we surpass Los Angeles. To say nothing of our grand boulevards and taverns (where never, never would one be served Huevos Rancheros on a tin plate) and our excellent mayor who habitually meets the City Council with a Holy Bible clenched between his teeth. But I had no desire to get into a slanging match with the city of Los Angeles, in my mind, and so turned my mind to the problem at hand, the long-range plan.

  I was considering the long-range plan, pressing upon me in all its immensity, the eight-hundred-and-seventy-six-million-dollar long-range plan for which I have been repeatedly criticized by my associates and by their associates and, who knows, by associates of the associates of my associates, with particular reference to the vast underground parking facility, when my mother telephoned to ask what the left-hand page of a book is called. My mother often calls me at two o’clock in the morning because she has trouble sleeping. “Recto,” I said, “it’s either recto or verso, I don’t remember which is which, look it up, how are you?” My mother said that she was fine except for horrible nightmares when she did manage to get to sleep, horrible nightmares involving the long-range plan. I had taken the eight-hundred-and-seventy-six-million-dollar long-range plan home to show my mother some months previously, she studied the many-hundred-page printout and then announced that, very probably, it would give her nightmares. My mother is a disciple of Schumacher, the “small” man, a disciple of Mumford, a disciple (moving backward in time) of Fourier, and a disciple most recently of François Mitterrand, she wonders why we can’t have a President like that, a real Socialist who also speaks excellent French. My mother is somewhat out of touch with present realities and feels that property is theft and feels that my father taught me the wrong things (although I feel that much of what my father taught me, in his quite bold and dramatic way, his quite bold and dramatic and let it be acknowledged self-dramatizing way, was of great use to me later—the épée, the leveraged buyout, Chapter 11—although had he really loved me he would have placed more stress, perhaps, on air conditioning, the manufacture, sale, installation, and maintenance of air conditioning). My problem with the long-range plan was not ethical, like my mother’s, but practical: Why am I doing this?

  It is not easy, it is not the easiest thing, to go through life asking this sort of question, this sort of poignant and noxious question that poisons and makes poignant (I detest poignancy!) one’s every can of chicken noodle soup or cup of Hot Spiced Cider, afflicting equally morning, noon, and night (I sleep no better than my mother does), infecting calm seriousness and the will-to-win. For America, I say to myself, for America, and that works sometimes but sometimes it does not; for America is better than because I can and not as good, not as sweetly persuasive, as movement of historical forces, which is itself less convincing than either what else? or why not? Where in this, I ask myself, where in all this “construction” (and the vast underground parking facility alone will extend from here to St. Louis, or very near), where in all this is the (and we do not fail to notice, do not fail to notice, the constructive associations clustering about the word “construction,” the hugely affirmative and congratulatory overtones clinging like busy rust to the word “construction”) answer to the question, Why am I doing this?

  What else? Why not?

 
There remained the mystery of Helen, whose moods, her aggressive moods, her fearful moods, her celebratory, resentful, and temporizing moods, remained to be plumbed, thoroughly plumbed. Thoroughness is the key to avoidance of noxious and life-ruining questions, perplexing, noxious, and life-ruining questions which threaten the delicate principle, construction. Construction is like a little boy growing up or an old man winding down or a middle-aged man floundering in the soup, where not infrequently I find that boiling lobster, myself. The spread (margarine, disease) of the physical surround can be like a spill of mixed motives or like an irruption of the divine (New Jerusalem, vast underground parking facility) or like decay in the sense of spoliation of an existing unshrubbed unbuilt swamp or Eden, these are the three categories under which construction may be subsumed, the word “subsumed” itself sounds like a soil test. But if one spends (and on the word “spend” I wish to dwell not at all) one’s time thinking about these issues one loosens one’s grasp on other issues, bond issues, for example, on leverage and the honest use of materials and density and building codes which vary fearfully from locality to locality and tax wrinkles and the golden section and 1% for art and 100% locations and cul-de-sacs and the Wiener Werkstätte and seals-and-cladding and fast skinning and cure of paints and the beveling of glass and how to clinch a nail and how to sleep well, at night, in the vast marché aux puces of my calling. . . .